Saturday, April 08, 2017

When I started out blogging for men's rights a decade ago, feminism was still commonly claimed to lead to more sexual freedom. However, it was obvious to me that this freedom only applied to women and alpha males, and feminism in fact led to more male sexual losers, which was one of my two big reasons for becoming an antifeminist (the other one being the hateful feminist sex laws). This dismal trend has now become an established fact supported by the official statistics and reported in mainstream newspapers. We have reached the point where almost one in four men are childless at 45 and probably never will have children, and not because they don't want to, but primarily because women are picky by nature and feminism empowers them to be more picky.

Back in 2009 I pointed out that rape is equality. My intention was not to promote rape, but I do think we should make society choose between forced equality for both sexes or for neither (and it doesn't need to be rape either, but some kind of subsidy or affirmative action to help male sexual losers). Remarkably, men have simply accepted forced equality for women while neglecting to claim it for themselves, so here we are in the present situation with so many male sexual and reproductive losers that wouldn't have existed without feminism and its coercive measures to empower women at the expense of men.

I no longer think the male losers will rebel. By all accounts, the vast majority simply accept their lot. But at least now they can easily inform themselves about the cause of their situation simply by reading the mainstream media. That is progress, as far as it goes.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

So what do I think, do we have free will? Let's see. I definitely have a will, at least. I know that I am free to act in accordance with my will, within the limits of my willpower and physical constraints. My will appears to be determined, but so what? I can't want something I don't want, but I can want everything I want. So there is no problem, except willpower, which is a separate issue.

You want your decisions to be determined by the person that you are, because that is how you are most likely to make the best possible decisions for yourself. No one is better qualified than you to know what you want. The person that you are was determined by your genetics and the environment that you were born into, none of which you had a say in (you obviously can't design your own creation because you have to exist in the first place before you can do anything). As Angry Harry Points out, if there is such a thing as a soul, you didn't choose it either, and if God is responsible for your existence, then that is also beyond your control.

In any case, here I am and I take ownership of the person that I am and I want my will to be determined by it. I am therefore at peace with determinism. Your will is determined the only way you should want it to be determined, if you are a healthy human (and yes, that is a big caveat, but letting others mess with your will is fraught with extreme danger even if you are what is considered insane). Any other causation of your will would make it less rather than more free, or at least less of what you want it to be.

I agree with Angry Harry that wrongdoers (including feminists) still need to be punished even if they have no free will, because punishment is one of the best ways to influence behavior. The same applies to political activism. Maybe they couldn't have acted differently, but they and others will act differently in the future if we acknowledge personal responsibility. I also agree that perhaps we should have some more compassion with wrongdoers, particularly when they bear a heavy price. They have less reason to proudly take ownership of their soul or essence than I have, because it led to such disastrous results for them and others. Nevertheless, the lack of free will does not excuse their actions, and they should still be punished, but perhaps punishments should be more limited. Arguably there should be no death penalty or life in prison, at least if the person is willing to be rehabilitated.

Now I want to delve a little deeper into the metaphysics of free will, because it is by no means settled if it exists or if the hardcore determinist position is true. The fact that we feel free to make decisions cannot be so easily dismissed. Why did evolution give us the feeling of free will if it doesn't do anything? After all, it would be redundant to have an awareness or even the illusion of free will if it can't influence behavior, so it would not be maintained through natural selection. One possible answer is that your will definitely does do something important for behavior, but it may still not be free in the philosophical sense which demands indeterminism (which, as I have shown, is an unreasonable position to take). If philosophical zombies were possible and easy, nature would have made them instead of us. I believe zombies are possible given unlimited computation -- the path artificial intelligence is currently taking seems to lead there -- but the fact that we are conscious, including conscious of our own decision-making, shows that it is easier to make sentient creatures with the feeling of free will, at least with the resources that biology has to work with. Our emotions and experience of will are shortcuts to what would otherwise require unrealistic amounts of computation. But why is this so? That is the hard problem of consciousness, I guess, and I don't know.

Another possible answer is that consciousness is a necessary result of some forms of information processing -- the kinds optimized by biology, at least -- and free will is a necessary aspect of consciousness, particularly when we need to make plans about the future. Perhaps you can't have consciousness which takes the future into account without the feeling of free will (and if you only live in the moment, the issue can't arise in the first place). It has been proven that no being can predict his next action, which means that we all have free will from our subjective point of view. And that perspective is the only one which really matters most of the time. In that case, free will is a happy accident of biology and logic.

So I am mostly a compatibilist, while open to the possibility that there is something more to free will that we don't understand. I am living proof that people can choose to go radically against their environment without being insane or otherwise highly unusual, since I refused to internalize the sexual taboos of my culture and instead became a men's rights activist. To me it feels like I made a choice, and you have that choice too, if you are reading this. Even if determinism is ultimately true, you now have enough information to reject the feminist sex laws. I made a moral choice based on thinking about how the world ought to be versus how it is. Not some Utopian vision, mind you, just a strong desire to repeal certain profoundly unjust laws. We know this is humanly possible, because these laws were created by humans in the first place, most of them very recently.